Year: 1985 Director: George Mihalka Cast: Winston Rekert, Karen Black, John Novak Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes MPAA Rating: R
Plot:Eternal Evil follows disaffected TV commercial director Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert), who learns how to astral project from former dancer Janus (Karen Black, who should be a very familiar name for lovers of cult and horror cinema, and who we've already encountered for Census Bloodbath in The Last Horror Film). When people who have crossed him begin to die from severe internal hemorrhaging, Paul begins to suspect that he may be subconciously responsible, though he tries his best to keep this fact from the investigating detective Kauffman (John Novak).
Analysis:Eternal Evil, also known as The Blue Man (this was two years before that phrase would have been associated with a "group" of any kind), was directed by George Mihalka. That might not necessarily mean anything to the casual reader, but I have been doing this for a long time, my friends, so I immediately clocked that he was the director of 1981's My Bloody Valentine, a very good movie to have been the director of.
This also clued me into the fact this movie was Canadian, which should also have been a good sign, considering the fact that the Great White North has an unconscionably solid track record with the slasher genre. Unfortunately, sometimes people only have one home run in 'em. While this supernatural slasher movie came out after A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was almost certainly produced before the movie became a hit and taught slasher filmmakers that fantastical entries in the genre should also look fuckin' bonkers on top of being surreal.
What we get instead is a slasher that is so far afield from what a slasher actually does that the first 30 minutes had me convinced I had made a misstep at some point during the research that got this title on my list in the first place. The kills are few and far between, and when they do come, they are uniformly tedious, involving the victims grunting and falling over while the camera twirls around their heads and seems to peck at them like a hungry bird.
Slashers that feature killers with non-traditional M.O.s can definitely work. Just look at the delightful Murder by Phone. But these boring kills are but brief interludes between boring exposition scenes, including Kauffman watching a documentary that explains exactly what's going on about 45 minutes before anybody in the movie seems to twig to it. Honestly, it reads like one of those 1950s sci-fi B-movies that fancied themselves hard sci-fi and really took to the blackboard to teach you about everything that's going on in the story. Maybe Canadian audiences really needed a crash course on astral projection in 1985, but I sure didn't. Although... if a local 1980s TV news report about the advent of a wacky new food trend that I saw online is in any way accurate, the general public seemed to have similar trouble grasping the concept of a pizzeria back then, so if that was indeed the case, learning about astral projection was probably the equivalent of a year of grad school.
Anyway, it's dull and the cinematography is trying so hard that at first I thought I might like it until it kept reminding me of the cinematic overexuberance of a student film. Unfortunately, there is not much good to temper the bad. Karen Black is woefully underused until the glorious moment toward the where she is suddenly not. And there's exactly one striking shot in the movie. Which is also used for the poster, because everything you love to complain about Hollywood doing now was just as annoying back then.
It wasn't a terrible movie at the level of true bottom-of-the-barrel 1985 trash like Victims!, but it's absolutely a huge step down for Mr. Mihalka, who made one of the greatest masterpieces of one of the greatest years for slasher cinema. The only other thing I can point to about Eternal Evil that is even in the realm of "interesting," let alone "good," is the fact that it is definitely interested in queerness. It doesn't really understand it, but there's a lot of gender and sexuality fuckery going on that I would never have expected from an exploitation movie of this vintage.
Killer: Janus (Karen Black)
Final Girl: Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert)
Best Kill: They're pretty much all the same, but at least the murder of Paul's father-in-law Bill involves a ghostly force slamming him against a wall, which is neat.
Sign of the Times: The majority of the score sounds like one of Depeche Mode's drum machines slowly falling down the stairs.
Scariest Moment: An astral voice that is controlling Paul's young son Matthew (who definitely has the shining) commands him to drink bleach.
Weirdest Moment: A quiet scene in Paul's home smash cuts to an adult man in a diaper talking directly to the camera. This turns out to be a commercial that Paul is shooting, but we haven't even learned what his job is at this point.
Champion Dialogue: “It's hard having an appetite when your food smells like paint stripper."
Body Count: 6
Dr. Meister is astral projected to death.
Bill Pearson is astral projected to death.
Jennifer is astral projected to death.
Scott is killed offscreen.
Monica is shot in the gut.
Janus is shot in the back of the head.
TL;DR:Eternal Evil is a muddled mess that takes up too much time on its way to nowhere in particular.
Year: 1985 Director: Christopher Lewis Cast: Juli Andelman, Charles Ellis, James Vance Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes
Plot: Blood Cult is set at what the opening crawl calls a "small Midwestern university." Central State College can't be that small, though, considering that it has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sorority houses, which are being preyed upon by a cleaver-wielding killer who dismembers their victims. After local sheriff Ron Wilbois' (Charles Ellis, who we'll see reprising this role in the 1986 sequel Revenge) daughter Tina (Juli Andelman of Silent Scream) uses her job at the university library to find him a book about the occult, he begins to suspect that the slayings are being perpetrated by a witch cult who are creating a Frankensteinian effigy to sacrifice to their canine god.
Analysis: With Blood Cult, we get a glimpse into the bright, shiny future that lies ahead for Census Bloodbath. While Blood Cult's ad campaign's claims that it is the first-ever shot-on-video horror movie are spurious, the regional production from Tulsa, Oklahoma is certainly one of the first. The video marketplace was just starting to heat up in the mid-1980s, and without it the slasher wouldn't have survived beyond 1986, even with the Elm Street franchise doing its best to liven up the place.
This is why the number of movies I have coming at me per year through the rest of the 1980s will shoot up precipitously come 1987, so I'm can't say I'm always sure I'm happy about the way things turned out with that there video market. However, history is history, so it's pretty neat to finally be covering Blood Cult.
Unfortunately, the movie combines two of my least favorite slasher subgenres: the police procedural and the cult movie (shoulda seen that one coming). The reason I don't like cult movies is that I prefer my slasher formula to be delivered a little more cleanly, with just one killer doling out deaths. Or two killers, if it's an absolute necessity. Thankfully, that turns out not to be a huge concern here. The death scenes are delivered in a pretty meat-and-potatoes slasher movie way, so the cult stuff doesn't really come to eclipse the movie with its ooky stupidity until late in the game.
Meanwhile, the reason I don't like police procedural slashers because they focus on the law enforcement officals tracking down the killer rather than the victims, usually resulting in the victims becoming paper-thin characters. I wasn't so lucky in this case. Not only do the victims have no discernible personalities (the most we learn is that one of them likes anchovies on pizza, which is hardly a selling point), most of them don't even get names.
Unfortunately, they don't even function properly as body count padding, because the kills here are uniformly terrible. Here is how each of them plays out: A killer with a vaguely defined weapon (even the coroner seems unsure if it's a cleaver or a knife) skulks around in the dark for a while and then kind of flails the limb holding the weapon in the general direction of a victim's body, for a very long time. Eventually the victim dies(out of sheer boredom, presumably) and catch a glimpse of the dismembered body part being collected, as represented by a prop that looks so cheap that it wouldn't even have made the Spirit Halloween catalogue.
So, it's not a very good slasher movie or a very good cult movie. Hell, it's a pretty incompetent movie all around, with a generally loose grip on acting, continuity, the 180-degree line, where to put the film gate (hint: not in the frame), and so on. And at best it's only a half-decent procedural. So why did I not hate Blood Cult?
It's certainly not because of all the good qualities it has. I could count those on one hand: 1) There is exactly one excellent shot of a foggy alleyway, 2) The father-daughter relationship is well-established and genuinely sweet, 3) The instrumental score has this radical Miami Vice-esque synth motif that makes scenes seem more dynamic than they are, and - oh, would you look at that, I didn't even need the whole hand.
Nevertheless, there is something effortlessly charming about its regionalisms and its insistent hokiness. One does get the sense of a bunch of people taking the week off work and throwing together a movie, just for fun (which is exactly what happened, by the way). Nobody in this movie can really act, but it does have a magical time capsule quality that is completely free of Hollywood polish. Everyone in this movie just looks like a normal human being from the mid-1980s, doing their thing with their worries about the outcomes of local elections and their toilets with carpeted lids and all that jazz. I just think that's nice.
Killer: The Blood Cult, including Doc White (Peter Hart, who also returns in Revenge) and Tina (Juli Andelman)
Final Girl: Sheriff Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis)
Best Kill: I suppose this is telling about how tepid the movie is, but the best kill is the offscreen murder of the dog Sparks, which is presented as a wide exterior shot of a house and a barn where the noise of the dog barking at the chickens and subsequently being decapitated plays alongside dialogue of Sparks' owner Gracie (Bennie Lee McGowan of both Christopher Lewis' Revenge and his other 1985 slasher The Ripper) wondering where he's run off to.
Sign of the Times: For a time, Sheriff Ron is terrified that these murders might somehow be related to Dungeons & Dragons.
Scariest Moment: While Ron is talking to a potential witness at her home in the boonies, the movie keeps cutting to her creepy kids just like... whittling on the porch and staring. They have nothing to do with anything, but it's unsettling!
Weirdest Moment: At one point, the killer appears to be stepping to the beat of the instrumental score.
Note: The copy I was able to find of this Spanish-language movie did have subtitles, but they were extremely literal translations that frequently misunderstood homophones such as "un hombre" and "un nombre," so they were practically useless. I do know enough Spanish to get by, but Mexican Spanish, not Spain Spanish. So take my review with a grain of salt, if you're curious about this movie. But you really shouldn't be. PS: Check out one of my favorite mistranslations in the "Champion Dialogue" section.
Year: 1985 Director: Carlos Aured Cast: Adriana Vega, Sara Mora, José Luis Alexandre Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes
Plot:Atrapados en el miedo (also known by the far inferior English-language title Caught in Fear) follows two couples: the more established (and thus hornier) Antonio (José Luis Alexandre) and Ana (Sara Mora) alongside the newly-set-up José (Joaquín Navarro) and Laura (Adriana Vega), who is Ana's sister. They hang out for the weekend in an isolated manor home that just so happens to be quite close to the psychiatric hospital from which a killer known as el Loco (Luis Canovas) has just escaped.
Analysis: Atrapados en el miedo has absolutely glorious opening credits. And I'm not even trying to damn the movie with faint praise, though admittedly there isn't much more praise coming its way. The credits are meant to evoke dripping blood, I think, but they have this red-brown-black dripping aesthetic that makes them seem more like a lava lamp. Anyway, whatever is going on, the opening is jaunty and lively in a way that had me feeling a certain amount of goodwill toward the movie right away.
Reader, the movie eventually drained every last ounce of said goodwill. I haven't seen director Carlos Aured's Spanish giallo movie Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (aka The House of Psychotic Women) from 11 years earlier, but that enjoys a certain reputation that this movie completely fails to live up to.
I mean, sure, there are a few brutal moments scattered throughout. For instance, the unnamed lesbian who tries to seduce her friend in the opening scene gets her neck snapped for her troubles, and that foley gives a mean crunch. It's hard to deliver an impactful kill when you don't have the budget for gore, but that scene delivers. However, the exploitative angle of the opening scene (this isn't the first Spanish-language movie I've seen to start with some lesbian sex-murders, and it won't be the last) is instantly dropped in favor of spending time with couples who love talking about sex way more than actually doing it.
If the filmmakers intended on deriving terror from evoking the feeling of being a fifth wheel on a vacation with two of the most annoying couples in the world, then they accomplished their goal, one hundred percent. And we don't even get to see them die! Spoiler alert, I guess. That's right, not a single one of the four main characters I listed in the plot synopsis is dead by the end of the movie. We are forced to watch them laboriously make grocery lists, go to and from town, and trade boring stories, and they don't even have the decency to perish for our amusement!
The killer (whose face is kept unseen until one late scene where it just randomly isn't) kinda just wanders around the outside of the house, dicking around. He frightens the gals once or twice, and he has a habit of flexing his thumbs like he's just itching to strangle, which is a unique little gimmick. But he has no backstory, no personality, and really no M.O. because he only kills a few people on the outskirts of the narrative. Forget attempted murder, this whole movie is an attempted slasher.
There's just enough going on in the movie that it almost feels legit for the first act and a half, but eventually it becomes so tedious that when one of the characters goes into a fugue state out of fear, I was terribly envious of her ability to dissociate.
Killer: El Loco (Luis Canovas)
Final Girl: Laura (Adriana Vega) feat. everyone else
Best Kill: The killer is eventually defeated by being run over with the car. And run over again. And again. They're just doing donuts to repeatedly smush the guy. It's excellent.
Sign of the Times: I mean, it's not like this brand isn't still around, but something about the sign in the background telling us to "Beba Fanta" (aka "drink Fanta") really felt like a perfectly 1980's sight to behold.
Scariest Moment: The shadow of el Loco's head rises up the stairs toward where Laura and Ana are standing.
Weirdest Moment: There's a cuckoo clock jump scare.
Champion Dialogue: “The sailboat is completely virgin virgin."
Body Count: 4
Mónica is choked with a tree branch.
Lesbian has her neck snapped.
La Sobrina Marcela is strangled.
El Loco is done donuts upon.
TL;DR:Atrapados en el miedo isn't exactly as bad as a slasher can get, but it makes an absolute hash of the format nevertheless.
Year: 1985 Director: Tony Lo Bianco Cast: Mike Connors, Anne Archer, Ian McShane Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes MPAA Rating: R
Plot: Too Scared to Scream follows a series of slayings that take place in a luxury New York City high-rise apartment complex known as the Royal Arms. Could it be perpetrated by the charming, Norman Bates-esque doorman Vincent Hardwick (Ian McShane), who has a strange relationship with his mother and doesn't realize that absolutely nobody is thrilled by his habit of constantly quoting Shakespeare? Probably not, because the movie keeps refusing to show you the killer's face, so if you know a single thing about murder mystery tropes, you know that the detectives on the case - the hard-bitten Lieutenant Alex Dinardo (Mike Connors of Mannix) and the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Kate Bridges (Anne Archer of Fatal Attraction) - have their work cut out for them.
Analysis: I'm going to give you a quick peek behind the curtain of Census Bloodbath. I generally watch each year's movies in chronological order by release date, but there is always a random cludge of titles that don't have proper release date information. These are usually obscure video titles or movies that nobody has cared enough about to keep proper records on, and they are usually abysmal for that reason. I used to carve my way through said cludge at the end of each year, but that always killed my drive to want to keep moving forward, so I switched it to the beginning of the year, thus saving the best (or at least the better) for last.
They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore was the last from the "unknown" pile of 1985 (your clue as to it belonging to that elite group was the 2/10 score), which is why we're suddenly finding ourselves with an embarrassment of riches. A beautiful poster and actors whose names we recognize (Murray Hamilton from Jaws and The Graduate is also kicking around here)? An original song that gets credit in the opening titles? Will the wonders never cease?
Yes, yes they will. That is because Too Scared to Scream is boring as shit, but at least it's a well-appointed boring movie that wasn't shot by teenagers with a camera they stole from a junkyard.
So, here's the problem. Too Scared to Scream wants you to think that it's classy. It's a Psychoriff that would even look down its nose at Dressed to Kill, is what I'm saying. This blatantly ignores the fact that the movie is tacky and exploitative as all get out, shuffling women out of their clothes at a relatively rapid clip, trying to startle you with a cheap spring-loaded bird jump scare (now there's a new one), and featuring multiple tawdry gay reveals. This is back when "gay" meant "psychopathic," of course. Again. Psycho riff.
Anyway, the result of it thinking it's better than being a slasher movie (when it really shouldn't, considering it's a big screen vehicle for fucking Mannix) is that its kills are woefully tedious. The ones that don't take place offscreen might as well have, because they are all delivered in the same Norman Bates stab-stab-cutaway style. This lacks the visceral intensity of Psycho, of course. Tony Lo Bianco ain't no Hitchcock. What we get in between these wan kills is a bunch of go-nowhere romance with Kate and Alex, a final girl sequence where Kate keeps desperately trying to figure out if the screenplay wants her to have skills or not, and Ian McShane reciting Shakespeare. That last part is delivered well, at least. I mean, we'd all go see him do Richard III, right? We're only human.
However, because this is a real movie with a real professional crew making it, there are at least some bright sides to our first soujourn into movies with actual legitimate release dates in 1985. There is a killer thriller moment where a victim is looking through her closet and is confused by a sleeve she doesn't recognize, only to realize that it belongs to someone holding a knife. And a playful scene where what seems to be spilled blood is actually wine. The movie is also a New York-set story that doesn't forget people of color exist, which is nice, even if it doesn't always remember to avoid trapping them in stereotype purgatory for all eternity.
All in all, this is still not a great showing for the slashers of 1985, but one could do worse. And I certainly have.
Killer: Edward (Chet Doherty)
Final Girl: Kate Bridges (Anne Archer)
Best Kill: There's really not much to choose from, but when Cynthia (Victoria Bass), the first victim, is Psycho stabbed, the camera lingers on her prone body while a voicemail from her mother plays, which is effectively tragic.
Sign of the Times: More than anything, this is a sign that the movie was shot in 1981 and shelved for a couple years, but it sure was a pleasure to see The Burning on the marquee of a Times Square movie theater.
Scariest Moment: Alex finds suspect Barry (Beeson Carroll) naked, bound, and gagged, with cigarette burns on his ass, under a pile of cushions in his apartment, and when he ungags him, Barry begins screaming his lungs out. It's all very Se7en.
Weirdest Moment: Kate grabs a telephone receiver to use as a makeshift weapon, and it works! Twice! You can't do that with an iPhone.
Champion Dialogue: “I've been in and out of so many clothes, I feel like a dancing coat hanger."
Body Count: 8
Cynthia is stabbed to death.
Mrs. Horner is stabbed to death.
Sidney is killed in the head offscreen.
Nadine has her throat slit offscreen.
Mike is killed offscreen.
Irma is killed offscreen.
Vincent is stabbed in the back offscreen.
Edward is shot.
TL;DR:Too Scared to Scream puts on airs of being classier than it is, which results in it failing to be much of anything at all.
Year: 1985 Director: Nathan Schiff Cast: John Smihula, Adam Berke, Mary Spadaro Run Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
Plot: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore follows Texas gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula of director Nathan Schiff's previous slasher The Long Island Cannibal Massacre) and Jacob (Adam Berke) moving to Long Island, where they proceed to murder the shit out of a bunch of people, mostly women, while occasionally complaining about rich Northerners often enough that the movie can pretend it has a theme.
Analysis: 1980'sThe Long Island Cannibal Massacre is a movie that is bad but exuberantly bloody in a way that only a teenage filmmaker could bring to life. This is indeed what writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Nathan Schiff was at the time. However, as we catch up with him five years later for his follow-up slasher, he is now in his early twenties and we can begin to expect at least a little more from him. Unfortunately, with They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore, we get even less.
Oh, it tries to do things. It really does. It even makes a stab at having arthouse themes. Or at least that's what I assume the monologue over a shot of a dismembered Barbie doll is meant to be doing at the beginning of the movie.
Unfortunately, the end result is completely incoherent. For instance, if this is meant to be about a war between the classes, why are the gardeners such cartoons? (Billy has on Alice Cooper eye makeup and a dark black fright wig, whereas Jacob's meant to have a disfigured face that is brought to life by what seems for all the world to be a dime store witch mask.)
But forget about the macro level of themes, the movie doesn't even have a grip on the micro level of scenes. There is a baffling moment in the third act where the gardeners kidnap one dark-haired woman, only to have the next scene feature two identical women tied up in a room while Billy proceeds to murder other women who look exactly like them outside, and it is dazzlingly unclear if he is attacking multiple women one at a time or a couple women over and over again.
On top of being incoherent, it is also boring. Even with a 70 minute run time, it finds ample opportunity to show us long scenes of, say, Billy messily eating from a can. Plus, The filmmaking is top-to-bottom amateurish (which, again, makes sense from amateurs, but you don't have to like it). Smihula and Berke's performances aren't exactly groundbreaking, but any time anybody else opened their mouth I felt a profound sense of relief that the gardeners were the characters we spent the most time with. Every other performance is as flat as the Long Island lawns that they have tended to so lovingly.
They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore at least retains the unrestrained Herschell Gordon Lewis messiness of the kills in Long Island Cannibal Massacre. They are uniformly poorly rendered (intestines look like shoelaces, somebody pulls a spleen out of a skull, and so on), but that sense of low-budget glee is still palpable. And, poorly rendered or not, some of the grotesque acts depicted onscreen truly are stomach churning (including multiple women having their faces peeled from their skulls - which seems to be the only bone that the filmmakers are aware of in the human body).
I think it goes without saying that the manner in which the plays out is also grossly misogynistic, in a variety of repellently ugly ways (including - be warned - the line that I chose for Champion Dialogue, which is vile but also too hilariously unhinged to ignore). But that is just one sin of many that this movie commits, a list that also includes having a complete lack of narrative thrust (there is no rhyme or reason to the murders, and at one point the killers literally just take a break to go to the movies) and boasting characters that fail so hard to even be one-dimensional that they might as well just collapse into black holes.
I suppose I should close out with a few nice things, just for fairness' sake. First and foremost, the theme that plays over the opening credits is pretty neat, showing off the same deft hand with picking library music that The Long Island Cannibal Massacre had. And the gag that [SPOILER ALERT] the gardeners end the movie by giving up and getting corporate jobs is actually pretty amusing. But beyond that, this is a blighted wasteland that is not worth spending a second of your precious time on.
Killer: Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke)
Final Girl: N/A
Best Kill: After knocking one of his employers out with a wrench, Billy puts dynamite in her mouth (well, the mouth of the doll that has suddenly replaced her), which is a move that I appreciated for its sheer Wile E. Coyote-ness.
Sign of the Times: One character is solely (and repeatedly) defined by her relationship to cocaine.
Scariest Moment: The first time Jacob is revealed, while peeping on a necking couple, his tongue is poking out of the witch mask and copious drool is pouring out.
Weirdest Moment: A woman who has been captured by the gardeners insists that she can get herself and her fellow captive out of the situation because of her skills as a psychiatrist. She then proceeds to tell Jacob to look at himself in a mirror and informs him that he's "fuckin' ugly." This works!
Champion Dialogue: “I ain't gonna rape you, bitch, you smell like fish."
Body Count: 14; or somewhere thereabouts - I'm unclear exactly how many dark-haired women there actually were in the final act. I suppose it's possible he propped some of them back up to shoot them again.
Ricky is smacked in the back repeatedly with a machete.
Sally has her intestines pulled out.
Movie Woman is stabbed.
Alan is impaled in the ass with a hot metal spike and then he's shot in the back.
Alan's Girlfriend is dismembered with a saw.
Sunbather is drowned.
Barbecue Girl is disemboweled.
Ms. Reynolds has her head battered with a wrench, and then her head is exploded with dynamite.
Dark-Haired Woman #1 is shot.
Dark Haired Woman #2 is shot.
Dark-Haired Woman #3 is chainsawed.
Dark-Haired Woman #4 is shot.
Dark-Haired Woman #5 is decapitated with a machete.
Dark-Haired Psychiatrist is chainsawed in the torso.
TL;DR:They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore has some moments of handmade charm, but they don't redeem its bottom-of-the-barrel storytelling.
Note: The American VHS release of Psycho Girls was heavily edited (the mid-1980s were extremely unfriendly to gore, if you recall). The version I was able to get my hands on had the gore footage spliced back in from an Italian dub, leading to certain death scenes becoming intensely saturated halfway through, at which point the characters all started speaking Italian until the sequence was over with. If anything, this enhanced the experience, but be aware I was not capable of fully understanding the dialogue in those scenes.
Year: 1986 Director: Jerry Ciccoritti Cast: John Haslett Cuff, Darlene Mignacco, Rose Graham Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes MPAA Rating: R
Plot: As told via the framing device of pulp novelist Richard Foster (John Haslett Cuff) at a typewriter explaining the story of That Terrible Day, Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco) escapes from an asylum and murders her sister Victoria (Agi Gallus) - who poisoned their parents via breakfast in bed and blamed Sarah for it. She replaces Victoria as the cook for Foster and his wife Diane (Rose Graham), who are holding a dinner party for their anniversary.
In attendance are the obnoxious psychologist Dr. Dekker Wilson (Dan Rose), his Marxist wife Femme (Doren Ferber), failed screenwriter but professional womanizer Anthony Zippo (Frank Procopio), and his wannabe actress girlfriend Wendy Fields (Kim Cayer, who played an uncredited porn actress in Blue Murder). They are all drugged by Sarah and spirited away to the abandoned asylum where she spent 15 years, where she and her fellow escapees Kazma (Silvio Oliviero) and Waldo (who does not seem to be credited, unless he is the Pier Giorgio DiCicco who is mysteriously credited as the mononymous character "Tony") torture and kill the majority of them.
Analysis: Fun fact. This movie was made by the same guy who directed Netflix's Hot Frosty. This kind of thing is actually not uncommon these days, because Canadian tax shelter cinema changes with the times. What was once lucrative during the slasher boom is no longer en vogue, so plenty of former slasher filmmakers have transferred their attention to Hallmark and Hallmark-adjacent projects. Perhaps most notably, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II screenwriter Ron Oliver has gone on to direct Christmas at the Plaza, A Timeless Christmas, Christmas Everlasting, and approximately 800 other movies with a straight white couple on the poster delivering Stepford smiles while wrapped in tinsel.
But let us not get bogged down in that strange corner of cinema history. If you've been paying attention to Census Bloodbath for any amount of time, I hope my mention of Canada had you pricking up your ears. That's right, the Great Blood-Red North, home to some of the best-ever examples of the 1980s slasher, is at it again. And by "it," I don't just mean saying "abote"an average of two dozen times per scene, though that does also happen here.
True to its lineage, Psycho Girls is considerably better than it really has any right to be. It's certainly not the cream of the crop like My Bloody Valentine, Visiting Hours, or the aforementioned Prom Night II, but for a grindhouse cheapie like this, it's downright extraordinary how many things go right.
Those things do not include the acting or the cinematography, which are never abysmal but infrequently rise above "flat." However, the screenplay is absolutely tops. The dialogue writing here counts among the best of the entire genre, and it can thank its frequent homages to pulp fiction for the fact that it had like a dozen runners-up for my Champion Dialogue selection ("My head feels like it's got menstrual cramps," anyone?). The story isn't always great, because it loses any sense of forward momentum once the torture starts and the third act mainly involves lots of running around echoey hallways, but it's got a strong sense of character, a cheeky surprise ending, and an unrelenting approach to brutality.
And let me tell you, these kills are a lot. Even before the movie gets torturey and toenails are being pulled out and whatnot, it's a lot to swallow. The movie is chock full of intense, bloody, disturbing moments that really land, though thankfully they are delivered with a certain amount of Herschell Gordon Lewis glee rather than the grimdark drudgery of the latter Saw sequels. This brutal sensibility spills out into its general atmosphere, as well.
In fact, there might not be anything more intense than the opening scene where little Victoria poisons her parents, and that doesn't even feature any gore. What it does have is an appropriately off-kilter child performer giving a dead-eyed stare and asking her parents to come back and tell her what God looks like. I mean... holy shit.
All in all, there is a lot going on here that really works, sometimes in spite of itself. Really, the only flaw I can find with this movie that it doesn't share with other low-budget horror movies of its ilk is the fact that we spend way too much time witnessing the Fosters' incredibly boring dinner party. But having sat through plenty of boring dinner parties in real life, I knew I had to just grin and bear it and pray for something interesting to happen. And you know what, it sure did happen.
Best Kill: Dr. Hippocampus (don't ask) has this bizarre telescoping pair of shears attached around his neck that are slowly squeezed, messily decapitating him, which is then followed by a disgusting moment where Sarah is washing off his skull and seems to be whittling the remaining flesh off of the bone with a knife.
Sign of the Times: I'm not saying Chappell Roan didn't base her whole makeup look off the floor show drag that Sarah puts on for torturing her victims.
Scariest Moment: That murder via breakfast in bed is eerie as fuck.
Weirdest Moment: Diane and Richard rapidly lift weights while staring at one another and then have sweaty, writhey, single-artwork-for-Olivia-Newton-John's-Physical sex.
Champion Dialogue: “What's money, anyway, except paper with germs on it?"
Body Count: 13
Pearl and
Victor eat poisoned pancakes.
Head Matron has her throat ripped out by Sarah's teeth offscreen, as described later.
Dr. Hippocampus has his head severed with telescoping shears.
Victoria is stabbed with her own knife.
Anthony has his throat slashed with a straight razor.
Wendy is electrocuted in a tub.
Dekker is shot in the head.
Femme has her throat slit.
Sarah is stabbed with her own knife.
Waldo is garroted with a fire hose.
Kazma has his head smashed with a rock.
Roger is repeatedly struck with a meat cleaver.
TL;DR: Psycho Girls is astonishingly brutal and surprisingly sharp, which allows it to overcome what it lacks in filmmaking craft.
Note: The version of this Cantonese-language movie that I was able to watch had an issue where longer subtitles were cut off at either side, which diminished comprehension somewhat, but not to a degree that I feel compromises my ability to review it in any meaningful way.
Year: 1985 Director: Philip Chan Cast: Melvin Wong, Philip Chan, Patricia Ha Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
Plot: Night Caller (Ping an ye) begins with the brutal murder of model and single mother Jessica (Terry Hu). The only witness is her daughter Edith (not credited in a manner that I can read), who is in shock and has not spoken since the incident. This leads her to be more or less adopted by the detective on the case, James Wong (Melvin Wong of Yes, Madam!), and his wife Kiki (Deborah Sims). Meanwhile, the buttoned-up James and his loose cannon partner Steve Chan (Philip Chan of Hard Boiled, also the director of this here movie) use their investigative skills and, naturally, their kung fu prowess to try and solve the mystery as more bodies begin to pile up.
Analysis:Night Caller has a simply incredible opening sequence. Somebody must have been making a mint off dubbed Dario Argento tapes in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, because just like 1982's He Lives by Night, the introductory kill is giallo as all hell. It's exquisitely crafted from top to bottom, disorienting you with jagged editing as it combines beautiful cinematography and crisp shadows with extraordinarily violent imagery (including an apple being smashed into Jessica's face during her struggle for survival). It is exquisite. It is horrible. It is pure cinema.
Nothing else in Night Caller quite lives up to this sequence, but that's hardly a knock against it. I couldn't imagine improving on that opening. Nor can writer-director-star Philip Chan, evidently, because the buddy cop comedy stuff kicks in more or less instantly after this scene. (Look, it's a Hong Kong movie. If you're not ready for the genre to change every 45 seconds, you're going to have to take two aspirin and go to bed straight away.)
I'm not saying it's a bad buddy cop kung fu comedy romance family drama movie, either. However, it reaches its aesthetic heights in the horror scenes, which also include the scene where James brings Edith back to her dark apartment to try and jog her memory and the movie's second kill (which is also the last proper body count kill, alas). Said second kill can't match the sheer audacity of the opening sequence, but it does involve a man being stabbed and falling from a catwalk, whereupon his corpse dangles upside down from a cable. After having fallen through a box of glitter. A box of glitter that was suspended over a catwalk full of models. On live TV. Y'all, this movie is kind of great.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. The aesthetic value of the movie drops off sharply every time it's not doing a horror scene. And while the inclusion of kung fu fight scenes in a slasher movie should provide a frisson of camp, only one is lit well enough to properly see what's going on. This seems like a peculiar misstep for a kung fu veteran to make, even if working behind the camera was never exactly the thing he was known for.
However, whatever that aspect of Night Caller lacks in camp value is made up for by the killer, Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong), who wanders into the movie at about the halfway mark and simply makes herself known, preventing the movie from adding "whodunit" to its roster of genres. Every time we see Bobby after the "big" reveal, she is wearing a new ludicrous outfit (in one scene, she is simply wearing mud) and psychosexually torturing a shirtless, handcuffed James. Now that's more like it!
I think I like this movie more than I love it, because the extremely tropey buddy cop material is front and center when it really shouldn't be, given how little effort was put into it. However, the horror is effectively horrifying, the comedy is frequently very funny (even during its darkest turns, such as the scene where a woman who discovers a valuable clue suddenly dies of a brain disease before the cops can ask about it), and there is always some inexplicable moment waiting behind every narrative corner (like the gang of punks who squirt ketchup on a restaurant owner's face and try to put his wife's fingers in the toaster).
Killer: Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong) Final Girl: James Wong (Melvin Wong) Best Kill: Accept no substitutes for the opening kill of Night Caller. Sign of the Times: When Bobby's accomplice Mickey (Kei Mai) introduces himself, he starts maniacally singing Toni Basil's "Mickey" (which is honestly the only way to sing it). Scariest Moment: An off-brand Chuck E. Cheese mascot character who looks like a bedraggled Hills Have Eyes mutant grabs Edith while she's at the arcade. Weirdest Moment: Mickey performs a scene from Taxi Driver to himself in the mirror while in blackface. Champion Dialogue: "I'll be back to add a few holes to your ass." Body Count: 7
Jessica is stabbed 29 times, with the final stab going in the gut before she falls through a window.
Ho Tak is stabbed in the chest.
One-Eyed Neighbor is shot in the head and burned to death offscreen.
Lady Who Finds The Ring dies of brain disease offscreen.
Newbie Cop is shot.
Bobby is shut.
Mickey is drowned in a mud bath.
TL;DR:Night Caller is a little more of a generic cop movie than I wish it was, considering its extraordinary facility at being a Hong Kong giallo. Rating: 7/10 Word Count: 958
People keep asking if I'm back, and I haven't really had an answer, but now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back!
Welcome back to Census Bloodbath. For those who have forgotten what the hell this thing is in the years since I last did much of it in earnest, my mission is to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. We're just over halfway through! And it's been more than a decade since I started, so here's hoping it doesn't take another 10 years to finish.
My slasher writing got interrupted by a few very good updates in my life, including getting paid to write about other things full time at ScreenRant and penning a murder mystery novel that I hope to drag out into the light of day at some point. I'm not going to sit here and promise five reviews a week or nothing, but I'm hoping to get back to posting semi-regularly, in the new, slightly truncated format I developed the last time I didn't have time to do this project. Without further ado, let's hop back into 1985. Where were we...
Year: 1985
Director: Donald M. Jones
Cast: Eli Rich, Rochelle Taylor, Dennis Gannon
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Plot:Murderlust follows Sunday school teacher Steve (Eli Rich of The Jigsaw Murders) using his free time to pursue his secret passion: murdering prostitutes and dumping their bodies in the desert, a nasty habit that has earned him the moniker "The Mojave Murderer."
Analysis: As I've worked on this project, I've noticed multiple sub-subgenres emerge from the overall morass of the 1980s slasher. Over the years, you get stuff like the "rubber reality" slashers inspired by A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lifetime-esque movies that I have dubbed the "women's picture" slashers, and so on.
One sub-subgenre that I have considerably less enthusiasm for is the "women be dying" slasher. These titles combine the faults of the "hero killer" format (by following the killer rather than the victims, the victims frequently become paper-thin characters whose deaths have no import) with intense indulgence in the misogyny that is always quietly simmering beneath the surface of the slasher genre. These movies, which are largely a hangover of the grindhouse pictures of the 1970s, typically feature a string of rapes and violent murders of women that are barely hung together on a "story" about a male killer wandering around, seeking out new victims.
Some of these movies, or others like them, can be quite good, or at least compelling. I was pleasantly surprised by Eyes of a Stranger (which, to be fair, has two final girls as its protagonists rather than being a hero killer movie). But when you're getting down and dirty in the muck with the likes of Don't Answer the Phone, it can be an entirely unpleasant experience. While Murderlust seems to fancy itself a successor to Maniac, another of the better examples of the sub-subgenre, it is instead just another speck of grime on the undercarriage of the slasher. Literally the best thing I can say about it is that at least Steve isn't a rapist. Mostly.
Murderlust is a scummy, scuzzy experience with no redeeming value. The best down-and-dirty horror movies leave you with the feeling of needing to take a shower, in a good way. But this one just rubs your face in muck and kicks you in the ribs out of pure meanness, because there are no aesthetic, tonal, or narrative niceties that allow you to feel like you've actually gleaned something from the experience.
It's a go-nowhere movie that just sits there idling for the majority of its runtime. It seems to be trying to horrify the audience by juxtaposing Steve's prim and proper Sunday school persona with his violent nature behind closed van doors, but we spend too much time with him for that to feel like a clear divide. Even in other professional/public parts of his life such as his job as a parking lot security guard or his interactions with his weird neighbor-cousin Neil (Dennis Gannon), who seems to be an ancestor to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Steve is a crude, boorish, lazy lout who is constantly braying at people who annoy him. Which is everyone. Rather than being horrifying or enlightening, spending time with him is simply irritating.
The slasher element is also repetitive and boring. He kills all of his victims in the same way (garroting them with rope), and their slayings are all overseasoned with misogynistic rambling. If Steve blaming women for all the world's problems and lobbing insults at them is meant to lend insight into his motive, Murderlust has defaulted on this loan.
The only thing that prevents this movie from becoming absolute bottom-of-the-barrel garbage like Victims! is the fact that its dialogue is frequently actually kinda good. When Steve is flirting with women before revealing his true colors, their reparteetends to sparkle, and the movie opens with him having a tête-à-têtewith a sex worker that actually manages to have a little insight into how someone can wield various forms of social currency (charisma, money, power) to convince someone to do something that would otherwise go against their better judgment.
I suppose I'll leave this part of the review on a high note, so I'll add two more things that I write. Although the movie only barely lurches toward having a proper final girl at the very end, her fight for her life is chaotic and brutal in a compelling way. Also, the real-life Mojave Desert scenery that pops up every 20 minutes or so is lovely to look at, but this is simply more proof of how hard it is to fuck up shooting a nice landscape, because the cinematography is doing its darndest to make everything as bland and flat as possible otherwise.
Killer: Steve Belmont (Eli Rich) Final Girl: Cheryl (Rochelle Taylor) Best Kill: They're literally all the same, so I'm going to pick Debbie's, because it takes place offscreen and saves us from wasting another three minutes of our lives on this movie. Sign of the Times: When Steve is accused of molesting a Sunday school student, the board of the church doesn't believe the alleged victim for even one single second. They don't even pretend to consider believing her, which is what I assume they would do nowadays. Scariest Moment: The opening shot of the movie is Steve staring directly into the camera with a blank look for like five full seconds. Weirdest Moment: Steve badgers Neil into helping him move a trash can containing a corpse into his van and he keeps bleating, "it's traysh, Neil, now push!" Champion Dialogue: "God is a big drag, and he doesn't exist anyway." Body Count: 5
Prostitute is garroted with a noose.
Prostitute #2 is garroted with a noose.
Teenage Girl is garroted with a noose.
Debbie is killed offscreen.
Steve succumbs to his gunshot wounds while crawling through the desert.
TL;DR:Murderlust is a complete waste of time, in spite of boasting slightly sharper writing than one might expect from a down-and-dirty, misogyny-forward slasher movie.
I assumed that Paris Hilton's sophomore album would all be shitty club tracks (more on those later). And while the whole thing is maybe a little underproduced, it really surprised me on a lot of levels. A major standout was this dance track about pondering mortality, a tune that is surprisingly sincere, catchy, and really hits me in my own personal sweet spot.
#9 "Eye of the Night" Conan Grey
Last year, I ranked Conan Grey's "Never Ending Song" at No. 6 and said, with great rapture, that Grey crafted "a song that genuinely feels like you would have seen it on MTV 800 times in 1987." Well folks, the album to which that song was the lead single has come out, and every track is exactly that. This one appeals to me the most, though, because of its sinister moonlit pavement vibe and - of course - that soaring chorus.
#8 "dumb boy energy" The Pussyboys
Transmasc indie pop punk band The Pussyboys rushed out of the gate with this glorious, laid back ode to gender euphoria and living life to its fullest without thinking too hard about it even a little bit.
#7 "The Devil is a Barmaid" Versengold
This neo-medieval band typically performs in German, and I wish I could have chosen one of those tracks, which are also great, but "The Devil is a Barmaid" is undeniable. It's one of those songs that truly feels like it fell out of a wormhole from centuries ago and was resurrected with modern instrumentation.
#6 "two" bbno$
This is a great music video, but don't let the goofy, engaging visuals fool you. The music itself is just as goofy and engaging. bbno$ (pronounced "baby no money") has great flow, but it's in service of lyrics that never teeter too far into taking himself too seriously. Pure fun. Also the kids' chant motif is a work of mad genius that simply shouldn't work, but really, really does.
#5 "Commas" Ayra Starr
Ayra Starr is the queen of music for staring out of car windows on long road trips, and I mean this as the highest compliment. Something about her work unclenches my shoulders instantly, and I'm not someone who likes "relaxing" music. But "Commas" is chill without sacrificing bouncy rhythms, dragging you directly into its welcoming atmosphere.
#4 "Joyride" Kesha
I was really worried that the completely misguided experimental sound of Kesha's most recent album, Gag Order, would indicate that her career was careening wildly away from anything I might find remotely musically interesting. However, by reclaiming her joy rather than focusing on the anger that drove Gag Order, she has also found the right way to make something that feels weird and aggressive while also being an absolute blast to listen to. I dare you to listen to this deranged polka pop track and not have a smile on your face by the end.
#3 "Gateway Drug" Daniel Seavey
This very well might be the sexiest song this side of Childish Gambino's "Redbone." The way those raspy verses inexorably slide into the floaty falsetto of the chorus is just perfectly designed to deliver the tinglies. This is absolutely necessary, considering how much musical support is required by the sheer self-confidence of the lyrics. If every part of the production wasn't perfect, the song would fall flat on its face. Luckily, that ain't a problem for Mr. Seavey.
#2 "The Code" Nemo
I am almost always of the opinion that Eurovision awards their top prize to the wrong song. That is not the case this year! In addition to being a fun, melodramatic lyrical dismantling of the gender binary, "The Code" does the same thing to the idea of genre itself. What is this song? Is it Europop? Glam rock? Rap? Opera? The answer, my friends, is a resounding "yes."
#1 "Eurostar" Nemo
I usually limit myself to one song per artist, and I just couldn't ignore that delicious opera motif in Nemo's "The Code," so I almost discarded "Eurostar" in its favor. But this unabashed party anthem is simply perfect, so I had to make an exception. This song has slightly fewer genres that it's playing with than "The Code" does, but if you know me, I can't not be caught up in a chorus that soars into the air and sweeps me off my feet. Wow, does this song succeed at that. It basically runs you over with a sonic bullet train every 50 seconds or so.
Bottom Five Songs of 2024
#5 "A Twink and a Redhead" Grant & Ash
When a viral comedy duo pivots to music, it doesn't have to be a bad thing. But this twink and redhead are paying homage to the shitpop churned out by Real Housewives stars, which needs to be performed without a shred of irony in order to work even a little bit. In addition to that failure of core principles, the chatty lyricism is awkward, the jokes simply aren't funny, and the thesis is baffling. Since when is the phenomenon of one twink and one redhead hanging out iconic? It's not, like... a thing.
#4 "BBA" Paris Hilton
So, Megan the Stallion is pretty great here, as she usually is. But the album version of "BBA" is just Paris alone, and let me tell you, this song needs Megan like Cookie Monster needs chocolate chips. Everything around her is tinny, shitty club music peppered with lazy patter that is neither compelling nor really makes all that much sense lyrically. This is exactly what I was worried the entire album would sound like, down to the parts where Paris tries to shoehorn her ear-witheringly awful made-up slang term "sliving" into the lyrics. Stop trying to make "sliving" happen, Paris. It's not going to happen.
#3 "I LUV IT" Camila Cabello feat. Playboi Carti
This one's tricky. The verse is a little off, but kind of inoffensive. So it hooks you just enough to keep listening until it hits the blisteringly repetitive chorus, which somehow isn't even the worst part of the song. That would be the screechy post-chorus bit with the shrill staccatto blasts of synth and random grunting.
#2 "Hey Rudy" Jimmy Fallon
Do I even need to write a blurb for this? Just... listen to 12 seconds of it. It's Jimmy Fallon Christmas music where he calls Rudolph "Rudy" and tries once more to convince everyone he can sing. You don't need my help pointing out its worst qualities.
#1 "club classics" Charli XCX
Oops, this is where I come out as a Brat hater, isn't it? Oh well, it had to happen eventually. This song starts off as a generic annoying club track where the same phrases are repeated over and over again. Then that ill-fitting music cuts in, making it sound like an ad accidentally started playing in another browser window. Then comes the bit where atonal chant-singing is paired with squelching synth farts. I simply cannot understand how this is meant to be a pleasant experience for my poor ears. This sounds like if somebody took "Joyride" out of the fridge and accidentally left it on the counter all night.
Worst Mashup/Remix: "Can You Feel the Love Tonight (From "A Whole New Sound")" - Pedro Sampaio Remix
Hiring Simple Plan to cover a song from The Lion King was already a weird choice, but now we're remixing that while still keeping it midtempo and throwing in some tropical EDM vibes and chopped-and-screwed bad DJ rap? It's sounds as if the Main Street Electrical Parade is trampling through Rio de Janeiro like a ravenous kaiju.
Best Music Video: "Taste" Sabrina Carpenter
I was actually resistant to this at first because people were like "you like horror, you'll love this video!" and I wanted to be like "You don't know me! Nobody knows me!" But I regret to inform myself that sometimes I'm a curmudgeon for no reason. This video is great, and a hell of a lot of fun. Plus, it co-stars Corey Cunningham from Halloween Ends, which is the deepest possible cut in a video chock full of references.
Worst Music Video: "Woman's World" Katy Perry
I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon of hating the song itself, because it's simply mediocre, not truly awful. But the music video is an absolute disaster, with a muddled thesis that somehow reinforces the gender binary even harder by trying and failing to show women doing typically "masculine" things. And why does the video for this empowerment anthem end with her stealing a phone from a woman of color? It's a rhetorical seven-car pileup, and I haven't even mentioned the sheer body horror of her being squished flat by an anvil, reinflating herself, and then inserting a fuel pump into her asscheek.
Best Collaboration:
"Chasin'" Paris Hilton & Meghan Trainor
Aaaaaand we're back on the Paris hype train. My parasocial relationship with this woman is so toxic, but what a roller coaster it is. "Chasin'" is basically the spiritual sequel to "Stars Are Blind," musically speaking, and it is by far the best thing that Meghan Trainor has been involved with in at least half a decade.
Worst Collaboration: "Now or Never" Pitbull x Bon Jovi
Pitbull has never been a good rapper, but he is usually charmingly daffy. This is just bad, and there is absolutely no need to drag poor Jon Bon Jovi into all this. Just sample him and leave it at that!
Best Guilty Pleasure: "Hands Dirty" Descendants: The Rise of Red Cast
Descendants 4 was a train wreck, but it perks up for this one brief sequence that's incredibly charming and mostly actually listenable, if you discount the shitty Disney rap bits.
Worst Guilty Pleasure: "Karma" JoJo Siwa
But it's soooooo catchy.
Best Comeback: ur pretty
Be honest, you're surprised I didn't say Paris Hilton. But as much as I like a lot of that new album, the most exciting comeback of the year was the X-rated pop punk maven ur pretty, which is one of the pseudonyms of the rapper Jake Hill. Even though ur pretty came first, so to speak, in recent times, Hill has largely turned his genius for writing filthy gay lyrics toward his country music alter ego Dixon Dallas. So imagine my delight when this new song dropped and I learned that pop punk was, indeed, not dead.
Worst Comeback: "I'm an Albatraoz"
I actually really love the 2014 AronChupa song "I'm an Albatraoz," which is wholly inexplicable but kind of a bop. But this 10th anniversary remake seeks to add reams of material to make every last line explicable, which is a fool's errand. Nobody was wondering why the mouse named Laurie was a bitch, y'all. Just keep making weird Europop, it's fine.
Best Album Cover: Mountainhead, Everything Everything
I like that this album cover edges toward minimalism but yet has so much going on. The texture of the titular mountain head is excellent, and I love the bold stripes of color juxtaposed against the greyscale image at the center.
Worst Album Cover: 143, Katy Perry
I know it's popular to dunk on Katy Perry these days, and I've tried not to do that too much. But come on, she's making it so easy. What's with this lazy-ass design where it looks like you're taking a look at her bad Wonder Woman cosplay through a jizz kaleidoscope?
Best Cover Song: "Holiday Road" Kesha
Leave it to Kesha to take one of the cheesiest songs of the 1980s (Lindsey Buckingham's theme for National Lampoon's Vacation, no less) and transform it into a superb, haunting dance track.
Worst Cover Song: "Good Luck, Babe!" Franz Ferdinand
It's probably a mistake for men to cover Chappell Roan in general. But the work of a pop star where the vocals are so important to her vibe should not be converted into typical alt-rock bleating. It's a crime against the ears.
Most Random Pivot to Music: Ronan Farrow
I guess it's not terrible? But yes, that's the author of Catch and Kill jamming with the lead singer of Sixpence None the Richer and singing about his breakup with Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett. The world really is a magical and confusing place.
Best Promotional Campaign: "Gay Americana" Cole Redding
Yeah, Cole Redding literally just posted these flyers around town, with no mention of his new single, then ate In N Out while the song played on a boom box and about 50 people watched and cheered. Of course I was one of those people. Grassroots marketing has never been better.
Best Song Title: "Single Soon" Selena Gomez
She knew she was birthing a thousand memes when she announced that her single, "Single Soon" was coming soon.
Worst Song Title: "Diet Pepsi" Addison Rae
This tells me absolutely nothing about the song, and it's got a gross corporate sheen that someone like the TikTok star Addison Rae should be keen to avoid until she establishes herself as a proper musician.
Best Lyric: "I think I finally hit my rock bottom / Should probably go and tell my father I / I killed my genie with a bottle" - from "HEY ROSE" by Mikolas
That genie thing just really gets me. It's such a simple poetic reversal of the type of bottle we associate with them, I don't have much to add. I just think it's so effective.
Worst Lyric: "Say you can't sleep, baby, I know / That's that me espresso" - from "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter
And now we move from a simple way to change common language to elicit deeper meaning to a simple way to change common language that makes an absolute hash of the whole thing. "That's that me" is unacceptable even within the astoundingly lax parameters of Top 40 pop songwriting,
Best Sample: "i'm not crazy" charlieonafriday
I used to hate samples with a burning passion, but I've since come to really appreciate them in a variety of contexts. This particular one I enjoy because it doesn't mind tweaking the original lyric, as well as its overall meaning, so it's actually engaging with Matchbox Twenty's "Unwell" in an exciting intertextual way, even if it's in service of a kinda generic fuckboi anthem that sounds like a castoff from The Kid Laroi.
Worst Sample: "I Don't Wanna Wait" David Guetta & OneRepublic
Now here's where you take the concept of twisting a sample way too far. This is just playing a lazy game of telephone with O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" (also known as "Numa Numa"). I have no time for it, especially when the same sample was already used better literally 16 years ago in Rihanna and T.I.'s "Live Your Life."
Top Five Song Discoveries
#5 "Superhuman" Clean
This is actually the theme song to that bad-good Australian queer series Single, Out, and it is by a country kilometer the best thing about the whole affair.
#4 "Breathe In, Breathe Out" Blanks
This song is bouncy and delightful, blending ennui and positivity in the space of a single line.
#3 "Ain't No Doubt About It" Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 Cast
This is one of the best onscreen sequences in the franchise, but the song is also super catchy and cute, perfectly capturing the exhilaration and angst of being in a relationship in your senior year of high school.
#2 "cross your mind" ROLE MODEL
ROLE MODEL has dropped a lot of great songs this year that unfortunately just barely missed making the cut. But this older track is still one of my favorites, with its laid-back, oh so cool, big city unrequited love song vibe.
#1 "don't shop when ur hungry !!" salem ilese feat. vaultboy
This song is a blast! The extended food and drink metaphor really scratches my brain, but I love the musicality too, especially with the way it works the checkout counter beep into the orchestration.
2024 Crush: Benson Boone
I gotta hand it to him, for someone who's so desperate for my attention, he's certainly found many ways to earn it. Flipping all around the stage, being shirtless at every possible opportunity... I really can't be mad about it. It won't make me listen to the music, but I'll watch the videos!
BOOKS
Top Five Books of 2024
#5 The Eyes Are the Best Part, Monika Kim
I have some quibbles with this book, which has a tendency to flatten supporting characters and their dialogue. But following a budding Korean-American serial killer and her obsession with eating eyeballs provides for some majorly effective grossout moments that I won't forget anytime soon.
#4 Disney High, Ashley Spencer
This was a breezy read filled with plenty of backstage Disney Channel drama. A real nostalgic treat for a latter-day millennial like me. Honestly, I wish it hadn't stopped where it did and just plowed through later Disney Channel projects like Good Luck, Charlie, Teen Beach Movie, and Z-O-M-B-I-E-S.
#3 Rough Pages, Lev AC Rosen
Lev AC Rosen, who is one of the most prolific authors out there right now, continues cranking out delightful period piece mystery novels, exploring the queer underbelly of post-WWII San Francisco and all the exciting nooks and crannies hidden within it.
#2 The Brightness Between Us, Eliot Schrefer
This was the sequel to my #3 book of 2021, The Darkness Outside Us. While it lacks the compulsively readable forward motion of that book, it expands the sci-fi world around the main characters in a deliciously compelling way and introduces just enough new people into the mix to allow the character study to deepen and remain just as emotional and interesting.
#1 Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell
I'd place this right alongside last year's Yellowface (my #2 book of 2023!) in a new genre I'm calling "millennialcore thrillers." Both books follow aimless, underemployed women who find themselves stuck in strange situations and feel compelled to find more and more rickety ways to justify their questionable actions. In this case, the character is a true crime obsessive falling for an accused serial killer and convincing herself she's in control of the situation. It's a rough read at times, but an utterly compelling one.
Best Book Cover: Your Shadow Half Remains, Sunny Moraine
I love images where a thing is also another thing (see: the poster for 1978's Halloween), and this one is also a third thing, just for good measure!
HERE'S SOME STUFF THAT I DID IN 2024
Podcasts!
I didn't guest on many podcasts this year, but I did visit my friends at The Friendchise to talk Alien: Romulus! And I talked about a whole bunch of horror movies, among other things, all year at Alternate Ending.
Events!
I got to report from a bunch of cool places for ScreenRant this year! I went to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, which was a formidable but entirely rewarding experience. And I got to travel to São Paulo for CCXP24, which was a total trip in every meaning of the word. While there, I got to interview Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller! Read about it here!
Rotten Tomatoes!
My reviews at ScreenRant have earned me an official spot on Rotten Tomatoes! I got to be one of the proud people who worked to push Hot Frosty down from the inexplicable 100% score it started with, so you're welcome, everyone.
New Tattoo!
For my 30th birthday I wanted to get a new tattoo and I decided to honor a sorority from a 1980s slasher movie in the frattiest place possible. I landed on Delta Rho Chi from The Initiation, and I'm very happy with how it turned out!
And that's gonna be it from me for 2024! Let's try to make 2025 as nice as we possibly can. I know it's gonna be hard. But 28 Years Later comes out, so that's cool at least.
